Reply #16: It has a title already, I've been working on it for a long time

[Ohio Joe]

It is called : I Swear to God I am Going to Strip You Naked and Nail You to the Front of this Building

It's a long story...

Back in 95, I quit a job working for Allmerica Financial in Worcester MA to join a start-up that had a decent plan. We were going to do Y2K work to fund building an internet company. When I joined, there were only 46 of us. My buddy Pat and I got a contract with Nationwide that really opened up things for the company and we started hiring as fast as we could. As we were working on our first batch of programs, fixing the Y2K issues, I had about 400 programmers working for me doing around 1000 programs. We kept them in a single library to prevent any duplication of effort (called modules, I won't get into that) and one day as I was sitting in my office, reviewing what was being done, I noticed that someone had made a copy of the library and different people were now working in different libraries... not good. I got up, and walked out to the front of where everyone was working, about 1000 feet and asked for everyones attention. I said "Someone here duplicated our library and we are not on the same page anymore, who did it?" of course, no one answered. I said "Look, I'm going to go back to my office and find out anyway, tell me now and there is no problems"... again, no answer. I said "Fine, we'll do it the hard way". Then quietly to the guy I happened to be standing next to, Sun, "Why do people do this?" and he said, "I don't know". I then told everyone to stop working until I merged everything back together.

I went back to my office and looked at the system log to see who had created the other library... That little fuck, it was Sun. Now, pissed off, I walked all the way back and said quietly (only he and I hear this) "Sun... you created this, why didn't you tell me?" He says "I thought I could fix it". I told him "Stay out of it". and once again went back to my office.

The first thing I wanted to do was rename both libraries to be sure no one would use them while I was merging but when I went to rename the first one... someone was using it... yes, Sun. Now getting really pissed, I once again went all the way the fuck back out to his desk and said, once again quietly "Sun.... I told you to get out of those libraries" and he said "I" and I cut him off and said "No! Get out and stay out... no more games". and once again went back to my office.

I sat down, shaking my head in frustration and renamed the first library... good. I go to rename the second library and... it's gone... that mother fucker... he had better not have... check the log... yup, Sun deleted it without first copying out the programs, no idea how much work lost... ohhh, but I had definitely lost it.

I open the door to my office and screamed at him, SUN, I SWEAR TO GOD I AM GOING TO STRIP YOU NAKED AND NAIL YOU TO THE FRONT OF THIS BUILDING! GET AWAY FROM THAT TERMINAL NOW!". He left and I never did see him again.

Not my best moment as a manager but... No one ever let me forget it either :D